hope of hitting the fancy of this motley body that there is now a
tumultuous multiplication of books of every degree of merit; and amid
all this din there must be redoubled difficulty of choice. Yet the
selection gets itself made somehow, and not unsatisfactorily. Unworthy
books may have vogue for a while, and even adulation; but their fame is
fleeting. The books which the last generation transmitted to us were,
after all, the books best worth our consideration; and we may be
confident that the books we shall pass along to the next generation will
be as wisely selected. Out of the wasteful overproduction only those
works emerge which have in them something that the world will not
willingly let die.

Those books that survive are always chosen from out the books that have
been popular, and never from those that failed to catch the ear of their
contemporaries. The poet who scorns the men of his own time and who
retires into an ivory tower to inlay rimes for the sole enjoyment of his
fellow mandarins, the poet who writes for posterity, will wait in vain
for his audience. Never has posterity reversed the unfavorable verdict
of an artist's own century. As Cicero said--and Cicero was both an
aristocrat and an artist in letters,--"given time and opportunity, the
recognition of the many is as necessary a test of excellence in an
artist as that of the few." Verse, however exquisite, is almost
valueless if its appeal is merely technical or merely academic, if it
pleases only the sophisticated palate of the dilettant, if it fails to
touch the heart of the plain people. That which vauntingly styles itself
the _écriture artiste_ must reap its reward promptly in praise from the
_précieuses ridicules_ of the hour. It may please those who pretend to
culture without possessing even education; but this aristocratic
affectation has no roots and it is doomed to wither swiftly, as one fad
is ever fading away before another, as Asianism, euphuism, and Gongorism